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Imagining
What is sweetest in love is her tempestuousness,
Her deepest abyss is her most beautiful form;
To lose one’s way in her is to touch her close at hand.
To die of hunger for her is to feed and taste;…
We can say yet more about Love:
Her wealth is her lack of everything;
Her truest fidelity brings about our fall;
Her highest being drowns us in the depths;…
Her revelation is the total hiding of herself;
Her gifts, besides, are thieveries;
Her promises are all seductions;
Her adornments are all undressing;
Her truth is all deception;
To many her assurance appears to lie—
This is the witness that can be truly borne
At any moment by me and many others
To whom Love has often shown
Wonders by which we were mocked,
Imagining we possessed what she kept back for herself.
After she first played these tricks on me,
And I considered all her methods,
I went to work in an entirely different way:
By her threats and her promises I was no longer deceived.
I will belong to her, whatever she may be,
Gracious or merciless; to me it is all one.
Hadewijch of Antwerp (c. 1220 – 1260 CE)
Het 1e strofische gedicht (lied) van Hadewijch: Ay al es nu die winter cout (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Also known as Hadewijch of Brabat or Hadewijc of Brussels, Hadewych of Antwerp was a 13th century female poet and mystic who wrote in a Brabantian dialect of Dutch. She was possibly part of a community of beguines (lay Christians) and showed a great knowledge of literature and theology. She was known as a “minnemystik”, a mystic who focuses on “minne” or love.
Here’s the link to other Tuesday poems.
It’s Flash Fiction Friday in New Zealand this week (22 June), so the Tuesday poets are getting a bit flash. There are a number of events around the country, and in Auckland there will be a prize-giving event in the Auckland Central City Library (Lorne Street, in the Whare Wānanga, Level 2, at 5-7 pm) where the national flash fiction competition winners will be announced and you can enjoy readings by guests Siobhan Harvey, Murray Edmonds, Vivienne Plumb, David Lyndon Brown, Leanne Radojkovich, Katharine Derrick, Penny Somerville and others. Wellingtonians are meeting at the Library bar in Courtenay Place at 6pm – I’m planning to be there.
More details of events in other places on the National Flash Fiction Day site and an interesting article on how to write flash fiction (very short stories) from the Guardian.
Here’s a particularly short piece of flash fiction I wrote a while ago – the aim of this one was to write a story in exactly 100 words (excluding the title). You can read more at the Tuesday poem site from midnight tonight.
Neighbour
My neighbour spies on me. I’ve seen his Roman blinds twitching. He doesn’t realise I know.
I try to make his life more interesting, rising at strange hours to meditate on the roof. Some days I practise the flute in a ball gown.
I built a tree house in the back garden so he could watch me carrying things up the ladder: fifty metres of tinsel, a papier-mâché crab.
I like to think of him taking notes, trying puzzle it all out, wondering if he should tell someone.
I hope I make him happy. I think I’m all he has.
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